Another free-speech debate is raging, this time over a Tonight Show joke that the Golden Temple is Mitt Romney’s summer home.

Mr. Romney, the super-wealthy front-runner to become the Republican presidential candidate, is under fire for paying low taxes. On Thursday, “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno featured a joke that showed a picture of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the Sikh religion’s holiest shrine, and pretended it was Mr. Romney vacation home.

The joke enraged the Sikh community in the U.S., which claimed such comments are designed to malign their religion. As of Monday morning, a Facebook group set up to protest the joke had almost 3,000 members.

India’s Ambassador to the U.S., Nirupama Rao, will take the matter up with relevant authorities in Washington, said a spokesman for the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi.

As of Monday, The Tonight Show, which is aired on NBC, did not have any response to the criticism on its website.

The debate is the latest to pit India’s more-restrictive sense of free speech against a more-liberal interpretation of the right in the U.S. and many European countries.

Facebook, Google and other companies are facing a criminal lawsuit in India for hosting material that some here view as likely to spark religious discord. The companies have appealed to Delhi’s High Court to quash the case.

Author Salman Rushdie canceled a planned visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival this weekend after protests from Islamist groups in India over the presence of the author of “The Satanic Verses,” which some hardline Muslims find objectionable.

In protest, some authors at the festival read out passages of the book, which is banned in India. That led to questioning from the police. One of the authors, Hari Kunzru, who left the festival early, said he had been advised to do so after attracting the attention of authorities.

India’s government argues the need to keep the lid on racial violence, which it believes can be sparked by comments deemed to lack respect for certain religions.

The question here, though, is whether Indian authorities are pandering to minorities in religious groups who take inflexible views of their faiths and register hurt much more quickly than the mainstream.

There’s another question, too. Shouldn’t the Indian government be focusing on clamping down on real religious hate speech – say, politicians and others who incite violence against religious communities – rather than throw-away jokes like Mr. Leno’s?

Mr. Ravi, the Indian minister, clearly does not agree with this interpretation and believes Mr. Leno has overstepped his rights to free speech.

“I wish this kind of thing is not shown by any media in the U.S.,” Mr. Ravi said, adding that he has not seen the show personally and has heard about it from the Sikh community. “Freedom does not mean hurt the sentiments of others… This is not acceptable to us and we take a very strong objection for such a display of an important place like the Golden Temple.”

He added: “The American government should also look at this kind of thing. The embassy is fully aware of it and they will take it up.”

But what can the U.S. government do?

It’s true there are limits to the rights of free speech protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. Whether Mr. Leno’s comments crossed these – by intentionally meaning to hurt and denigrate the Sikh religion – will be up to others to decide.

For this observer, it seemed the butt of the joke was not the Sikh religion but Mr. Romney, who says he’ll declare on Tuesday his 2010 tax returns and an estimate for 2011.